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ridiculously long renders… can’t figure out why?
hi guys,
just wondering if anyone has any input on this,
i have some comps around 12s duration, with lots of layers as cards in 3d space. the camera moves from one area, pauses, to another area, pauses, then a final area.
renders are taking 10-14hrs for this 12s sequence on an intel mac, cs3, 2x 3ghz dual core, 3gb ram. i’ve done this thing plenty of times before on similar machines with no dramas, yet this one is incredbly painful.i do have one adjustment layer with the lens blur effect, and one with grain, and i know both of these are render hogs, but surely that shouldn’t account for it?
i’ve checked all my cards and they’re not massively high-res, some are 1000×1000 but some are smaller.
i am using shape layers with extrusion to bring titles on screen. could this boost the render time as they need to be rasterised” at each frame?
not really any effects other than the above – all colour correcting to the cards was done in pshop beforehand. i’ve had heavier comps before and they’ve rendered quicker… why is it so slow now? any of the above reason?
puzzled and frustrated,
scott. -
5 Replies
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Drag the comp into another comp and speed it up, maybe 30x (3% length). Render it with and without the render hog effects. Compare.
Consider pre-rendering without those effects, then apply the render hog effects to the pre-render. They will be applied to just one layer, and a smaller one at that.
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Sometimes things that you wouldn’t think would increase render time dramatically will. As an example, it was taking someone at work 30 minutes to render a fairly simple 30 second comp. They then turned motion blur off on a layer using the Puppet tool and their render time went from 30 minutes to 3 minutes (and you could barely tell the difference).
Likely culprits for slowdowns are effects (especially time based effects), comp size (HD takes a while longer), motion blur and 3D lighting.
I should also mention that if a layer is not visible throughout your composition, you can cut back on render time by trimming the layer’s in/out points to only the duration it will be visible (your mileage may vary).
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
turns out it was my grain pass… i’ve swapped it for another method of adding grain, can’t visually tell the difference, and it renders much faster. still taking a long time, but quicker.
do shape layers take a long time to render due to their vectoryness? continuously rasterised illustrator layers always take a long time, too.
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[Scott Geersen] “turns out it was my grain pass… i’ve swapped it for another method of adding grain, can’t visually tell the difference, and it renders much faster. still taking a long time, but quicker.”
What I like to do for grain is apply add grain or match grain to a 50% gray solid, render out 5 seconds or so of it, then loop that in the Overlay blend mode to add grain. Works like a champ.
[Scott Geersen] “do shape layers take a long time to render due to their vectoryness? continuously rasterised illustrator layers always take a long time, too.”
I would think not. Unless you have render intensive effects applied to the layer, 3D lighting or motion blur (which can all have a significant impact on render time). Again, I recommend that you trim any layers that aren’t visible all the time in the composition to only those times when they are visible.
Darby Edelen
Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
I was JUST going to suggest the render out the grain then overlay method…
Some other things that might be causing slowdowns:
– Large layers, especially in 3d space – even if subcomped to smaller sizes or scaled down in AE, they will kill your render times. Use the smallest images you can, based on how close they get to camera.
– lots of 3d layers going at once – unless there are interactions, you could try prerendering them in batches (i.e. the top 10 layers, then the next 10 etc.)
– 3d lighting effects. Prerender lit backgrounds etc. where possible.
– Lens blur is extremely slow. If possible, use Fast Blur instead (which is programatically identical to Gaussian Blur, just faster). I know the effect is different, but it is a time saving option in a pinchBrendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com
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